Abstract
This study examines the centrality of ethics within editorials published in the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants’ professional journal, CA Magazine, over the 1912 to 2010 period. Starting from the twin assumptions that editorials speak about appropriate professional behavior using a variety of words such as ‘ethics,’ ‘conduct,’ and ‘codes,’ and that appropriate professional behavior is situational, we use topic modeling techniques to identify these dimensions of ethical discourse. We then use social network analysis methods to map the position and centrality of ethics within the editorials across time. The results show that enunciations about appropriate professional conduct are broader than simply enunciations using the word ‘ethics’. The results also highlight that ethical utterances become more central, not less central, over time.
Highlights
This study examines the centrality of ethics within editorials published in the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants’ professional journal, CA Magazine, over the 1912 to 2010 period
Starting from Bakhtin’s (2013) notion of a speech genre and prior research on ethical narratives (Preuss and Dawson, 2009; Statler and Oliver, 2016), we examine how utterances about ethics are part of a larger professional narrative that centres around norms of conduct, norms of Corresponding author: Gregory D
Our data consist of 43,060 sentences from the editorials published between 1912 and 2010 in the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants’ (CICA’s) professional journal, CA Magazine
Summary
This study examines the centrality of ethics within editorials published in the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants’ professional journal, CA Magazine, over the 1912 to 2010 period. The analysis shows the usefulness of viewing ethics as a speech genre that consists of a common subject matter and way of speaking about norms of conduct. This view emphasizes that ethical utterances are a type of narrative and that conduct enunciations are broader than enunciations using the word ‘ethics.’ The idea that ethics is a narrative is not surprising since professional associations, given the multiplicity of settings in which practitioners work, require multiple ways of articulating the importance of ‘appropriate’ conduct. These other groups include clients, students, other members and the professional association itself (cf. Abbott, 1983), whereas the situations include auditing as well as consulting services
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